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In 2007 the writer/critic Tim Lucas published Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark. This massive tome, glossily produced, extensively illustrated, and over 1,100 pages long, has since been described, with some justification, as ‘one of the most impressive books ever to have been written about any director’ (Williams, 2011: 162). The end result of over thirty years’ research, Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark has served to underline, reinforce and possibly clinch once and for all Mario Bava’s status as a major figure not merely in Italian horror cinema but in world horror as well. However, such status has been bestowed entirely retrospectively, for during his directorial career – which ran from 1960 through to the mid-1970s – Bava, while a respected figure in the Italian film industry, received little critical attention and was not generally known to the film-going public, either in his native Italy or elsewhere.

How Italian is the American slasher film? How American is the Italian giallo film? I begin with these questions not because they have never been asked, but because the answers that are usually offered have not encouraged us to take the relationship between these two important horror film sub-genres as seriously as we should. By examining a seminal Italian giallo, Mario Bava’s Ecologia del delitto/The Ecology of Murder (1971, also known as Antefatto, Reazione a catena, A Bay of Blood, Carnage, Last House – Part II and Twitch of the Death Nerve) alongside a phenomenally popular American slasher film that bears an uncanny resemblance to it, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (1980), I will argue that we have more to learn about these well-known sub-genres than we might have imagined. More specifically, the centrality of natural landscape to both films suggests that the giallo and the slasher film can cross-pollinate to enable what I will call a ‘subtractive spectatorship’ that challenges some of our conventional assumptions about what watching graphic horror is all about.

Any attempt to nominate this or that film as the ‘first’ giallo has to negotiate the question of which version of this notoriously slippery term is being used – the giallo in its more inclusive Italian sense, ‘a metonym for the entire mystery genre’ (Koven, 2006: 2), or as a more particular B-movie filone that surfaced intermittently in the 1960s, blossomed more fully in the early to mid-1970s and has continued to appear sporadically, particularly in the films of Dario Argento.1 Either way, Mario Bava’s La ragazza che sapeva troppo/The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Italy, 1962; refashioned as The Evil Eye, 1964) and particularly Sei donne per l’assassino/Blood and Black Lace (a co-production involving Italy/West Germany/France, 1964) are often accorded seminal status in teleological accounts of the giallo as a cinematic cycle. Both have at various times had the distinction of being identified as the first ‘proper’ giallo; the former with its tourist-eyewitness heroine and the latter with its bodycount narrative, eroticised violence and overheated visual stylisation.

This chapter aims to locate a sub-set of what has become known as the ‘giallo’ filone within its historical contexts, and to ask what significance this relationship might hold for the broader study of Italy’s cultural history. Such an undertaking immediately poses methodological questions: what are we looking for when we seek to identify ‘history’ in such popular cinema; by what models can we best pursue a ‘historical’ approach to an amorphous, frequently unruly cinematic format like the Italian filone? Certainly, such films can offer insights into how discourses about the past have been represented and consumed within particular registers of historical address.

The first part of this chapter looks at how the global changes described in the previous chapter manifested themselves in Italy and offers evidence that there the kind of capital typically associated with popular genre films, short-term speculative capital, was a minor and strictly contained player within the country’s economy. Mario Bava’s cult thriller La ragazza che sapeva troppo was produced under these conditions. The second part of the chapter examines Bava’s film in its broader context, where small productions seeking to make a quick profit by monetising well tested sales points such as nudity and suspense where, at best, tolerated always critically ignored, in spite of their experimental and innovative character.

This chapter analyses films connected through their depiction of serial killing in contemporary Italy, which are usually categorised within the giallo filone. These are shown to demonstrate a variety of ways in which filone cinema was characterised by tensions between cosmopolitanism and parochialism, in turn providing further insights into how particular filoni sought to capitalise on a preoccupation with the recent past. The giallo's broader obsessions with past traumas, fragmented memories and the unravelling of supposed facts are thus placed in the contexts of Italy's contested recent past, illuminating the extent to which wartime memory weighed heavily on the 1970s present.

In recent decades, many Italian filmmakers have turned to the documentary medium in response to the lack of commitment by public and private broadcasters to the production of programmes of cultural significance. Unfortunately, the contestable funding available for their production is limited, as is documentary distribution beyond the festival circuit. The emergence and evolution of the web documentary has provided an opportunity for new channels of distribution and increasingly foregrounds the role of the user/viewer in their engagement, interaction, and negotiation with the reality documented. This chapter explores the issues of autonomous navigation, multiplicity, and self-reflexive aesthetics in Sergio Basso's documentary film Giallo a Milano and the associated web documentary Made in Chinatown, in order to understand the new modes of audience engagement provided by this combination of formats. It suggests that embracing the web documentary format triggers the immediate reaction of viewers to sociopolitical issues and creates a new kind of activist reflection, at once discontinuous, fragmentary, and thus open to debate.

This book explores the extreme violence that pervades Dario Argento's films, and particularly the ways in which they push the limits of visual and auditory experience by offending, confusing, sickening, and baffling the viewers. It looks at Argento's approach to his work over more than four decades of filmmaking, and his commitment to innovation that is evident in two closely related genres whose disturbing violence reaches previously unrecorded levels of pain, suffering, and mental anguish: crime thriller and supernatural horror. From his directorial debut, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), to Giallo (2009), Argento's films challenge a viewer's accepted ideas about film spectatorship, meaning, storytelling, and genre. This book also looks at the centrality of collaboration, particularly with family, in Argento's work by analyzing sixteen films that feature him as writer and director. Finally, it discusses how Argento's films function as rhetorical interventions against dominant views on film criticism, interpretation, narrative, and conventions through an examination of interpretive possibilities that connect the films to broader tendencies in film history.

Pure cinema is read as an aesthetic philosophy and stylistic practice that synthesizes an art cinema sensibility and a mainstream studio aesthetic design Hitchcock observed and further developed in his American films. Pure cinema thus incorporates both the radical self-awareness of the European auteur cinema and the generic narrative and image form of the American studio system. This synthetic style is then situated within a larger historical narrative that incorporates B-grade cinema traditions and styles (the Italian giallo cinema of Mario Bava and Dario Argento) and Brian De Palma’s self-conscious reconstruction of the B-grade thriller form. The chapter argues that the pure cinema ethos of these films and their filmmakers makes explicit a “visual vernacular” in mise en scène and montage construction that is then traced through Brian De Palma’s formal visual experimentation in Carlito’s Way.